Jimmy Buffet didn’t know where he was “gonna go when the volcano blows.” But I knew exactly where I had to go.

The volcano exploded thirty miles directly north of my parents’ house. We watched it blow the top clean off a mountain whose perfect, sugar-loaf silhouette had stood sentry over my city for all of my life, and all the lifetimes before mine. Not for the snow maiden Loo-wit (most call her Mt St Helens) the jagged peaks of her Cascade Mountains sisters; her impossibly smooth, rounded summit made its destruction all the more impossible to accept.

 

 

If you were here that day, you know. You never forget it, the wind and the smell of the sky burning and the sensation of standing under finely shattered glass when the ash blew through. The volcano blew the top of 9,677-ft Loo-wit clean away. If you weren’t here that day, imagine Mother Nature sitting in a pub at 8:30 a.m. on a Sunday, still chugging from the night before, working up to her Sabbath sermon to end all sermons. With her sulfurous superheated breath, she blasted the foam head of her dark ale across the bar and into the cosmos.

There was something perversely triumphant and majestic about the ash cloud that poured from the mountain. In strokes too bold for any pen in any language, it rewrote the definition of words like “billowing” and “towering” and “angry gray.” To be a human and watch destruction on such grandiose and picturesque scale is to live one of those moments wherein you’re left no filament of doubt that you’re less than a pinprick in the fabric of the universe.

The best place to go when the volcano blew, to behold the magnificence and feel my own verified insignificance, was the roof of my parents’ house, with its direct line of sight to the greatest show on earth that day. With my dad, a ladder and two lawn chairs, I went somewhere I’d never been—and never went again—to witness something I’d never seen, and likely will never see again. A handful of miles away and so overwhelming, it seemed no more than an arm’s length, as if we could reach out and touch it, and I wanted to, even knowing it would erase my arm like a careless pencil stroke.

We sat on the roof, my father and I, in those dilapidated lawn chairs, their fraying orange-and-white plastic webbing colors strung on tenuous aluminum-tube framing.  I don’t remember what we talked about on the roof that day. Maybe we didn’t talk at all, rendered breathless and bereft of superlatives to describe a spectacle beggaring description. The ash cloud bulged eastward across the sky, plunging over the horizon. Eventually it circled the globe and came back to us, powdering the city with the coda of its world tour.

The newspaper headline on May 19, 1980 declared Spirit Lake gone. How could a lake just be gone? Especially one where I had as a child played among the trees, swam, picnicked? It was too primal to comprehend. The headline and the ghost of Spirit Lake haunted me for years.

Spirit Lake was on the far side of the mountain; I couldn’t see it from my rooftop lawn chair. But when the volcano blew, that perfect sugar-loaf top slid down that north slope, burying a lot more than a lake. It buried the skyline of my childhood. It would be a couple of decades before I could look at the mountain and not feel that a piece of my own head had been blown off. I cried the day I opened a newspaper and saw that the tourism board of Oregon had adopted a new promotional motto: “Things look different here.”

Somewhere in the world there was a slick marketing exec who thought that one up. I wanted to grab him by the collar and inform him: “You have no idea.”